For decades associated above all with the University of Pisa, Arcamone was Professor of Germanic Philology and also taught General Linguistics and Onomastic Linguistics. A biographical note prepared for the Festschrift Nomina identifies her as a pupil of the great Italian linguist Giacomo Devoto and a collaborator of Carlo Alberto Mastrelli. The same account credits her with being the first university teacher in Italy to establish Linguistica onomastica as a distinct field of instruction. Later institutional descriptions likewise emphasize the exceptional position of the Pisa course in Onomastic Linguistics.
That combination is already characteristic of her scholarly profile. Arcamone never treated names as an isolated subfield detached from philology, historical linguistics, social history, geography, or literature. Her work instead demonstrates how proper names preserve evidence that other linguistic materials may have lost.
From Germanic philology to the names of Lombard Italy
The most enduring thread in Arcamone’s scholarship is the study of the Germanic linguistic heritage of Italy, particularly the legacy of the Langobards. Her early methodological article, Per lo studio dell’antroponimia germanica in Italia (1972), starts from a fundamental difficulty: the Germanic peoples who settled in Italy left little or no continuous written record in their own languages. Personal names, loanwords, glosses, and place names therefore become linguistic witnesses of exceptional importance. Arcamone argued that Germanic anthroponymy could be used systematically to reconstruct aspects of languages otherwise only fragmentarily attested.
This was not merely etymological name collecting. It involved phonology, morphology, historical documentation, geographical distribution, social transmission, and the chronology of naming systems. Her studies of Lombard personal names in Pisa, Lombardy, Campania, and elsewhere gradually built a picture in which anthroponymy became evidence for migration, cultural contact, linguistic adaptation, and the long process by which Germanic names entered Romance society.
Her work also anticipated methods that later became standard in digital humanities. As early as 1977 she published Per lo spoglio elettronico dell’onomastica italiana altomedievale, arising from work connected with the Florence-based Centro per lo studio delle civiltà barbariche in Italia. The paper explicitly addressed the possibilities of electronic processing for the enormous body of early-medieval Italian onomastic material - remarkably early evidence of an interest in computational treatment of historical names.
One particularly striking episode in this research concerns the sanctuary of Monte Sant’Angelo on the Gargano. Excavations there revealed inscriptions connected with medieval pilgrimage, including runic inscriptions. Arcamone’s 1981 study demonstrated their linguistic and graphic character and linked them with Anglo-Saxon visitors. Later historical assessments described these as the first runic inscriptions found in Italy and, at the time, the southernmost examples known. Her analysis thus connected Italian medieval epigraphy with the wider mobility of Germanic-speaking pilgrims across Europe.
Names as traces of migration and cultural contact
Arcamone’s work on place names developed the same principle at another level. Italian toponyms of Germanic origin are not simply lexical fossils. They can reveal settlement, land use, military organization, social structure, and cultural contact.
Her studies repeatedly examined elements such as fara, sala, braida, gaggio, pescia and many other formations whose survival in Italian place names preserves aspects of the Lombard linguistic presence. In a later comparative study, Langobard and Anglo-Saxon Place Names: A Comparison, she placed Italian evidence alongside Old English and English toponymy. The comparison was designed not to collapse the two traditions but to show how cognate or historically related Germanic elements developed differently under different political, geographical and linguistic conditions.
This comparative perspective is especially valuable because the Langobard language is so poorly documented directly. Arcamone repeatedly demonstrated that place names can preserve forms and meanings that illuminate a language otherwise reconstructed only indirectly. Her work therefore belongs simultaneously to onomastics, Germanic philology, historical linguistics and medieval studies.
The same breadth is visible in studies extending beyond Lombard material: names of animals in early-medieval anthroponymy, names of saints and demons, surname formation, the history of double naming, and the survival of Germanic lexical material in Italian. Her major synthesis on the Germanic element in Italian, published in the third volume of Storia della lingua italiana edited by Luca Serianni and Pietro Trifone, remains significant enough to appear in university Germanic Philology reading lists today.
From Lombard anthroponymy to Romance surnames: PatRom
Arcamone’s importance is not confined to Germanic studies. She also became a major Italian participant in PatRom - Patronymica Romanica, the international project for a Dictionnaire historique de l’anthroponymie romane. The project was launched by Dieter Kremer at Trier in 1987 and brought together teams working across the Romance-speaking world. Its aim was comparative and historical: to reconstruct the shared and divergent development of Romance surname material across national boundaries.
Arcamone was among the scholars closely associated with the project from its early phase, and the Patronymica Romanica publication series lists her among its principal collaborators. In a 2023 interview she herself described the project as one of the major frameworks within which she had studied modern Romance surnames.
The importance of this participation is methodological as well as institutional. It joined two domains that Arcamone had long treated as historically continuous: the personal names of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, on the one hand, and modern European surnames, on the other. Her work repeatedly asks how older personal-name systems survive, change, hybridize and become hereditary family names.
Giving literary onomastics an institutional home
A second great legacy lies in literary onomastics.
In 1993, Arcamone helped found the Pisa-based association Onomastica & Letteratura (O&L) together with Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso, Donatella Bremer, Francesco Maria Casotti, Davide De Camilli, Emanuella Scarano and Mirko Tavoni. Its explicit purpose was to promote the study of names in Italian and foreign literatures through conferences, seminars and publications.
This deserves emphasis. Literary names had certainly been studied before, but Arcamone and her colleagues helped give the field a durable institutional framework in Italy. O&L developed a tradition of regular international meetings, and from this environment emerged the annual journal il Nome nel testo. Its current editorial information still lists Maria Giovanna Arcamone among its directors.
The book series Nominatio, also founded by Arcamone, widened this infrastructure further. The series was designed for dictionaries, repertories, manuals, monographs and collected studies in onomastics, especially literary onomastics. Its first volume, L’incanto del nome (2002), edited by Arcamone, Giorgio Baroni and Donatella Bremer, grew out of an O&L conference and symbolically placed the act of naming itself at the centre of literary analysis.
Arcamone herself continued to contribute directly to literary onomastics. A good late example is her 2019 article on the proper name Gattopardo in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, where she examined why this particular animal name became such a powerful literary designation.
Pisa 2005 and the international onomastic community
Arcamone’s influence is equally visible in the institutional history of international name studies.
The 22nd International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, held in Pisa from 28 August to 4 September 2005 under the title I nomi nel tempo e nello spazio, was one of the major international onomastic meetings of its period. The Accademia della Crusca records Arcamone as a member of the organizing committee together with Donatella Bremer, Davide De Camilli and Bruno Porcelli. The published proceedings show the breadth of the congress, ranging from linguistic and etymological research to literary onomastics and international surveys of the discipline.
At that congress Arcamone was elected President of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS). Official ICOS records confirm that she served from 2005 to 2008, succeeding Mats Wahlberg and preceding Sheila Embleton.
Her presidency is significant in a career already marked by international cooperation. It placed an Italian scholar whose intellectual formation lay in Germanic philology at the head of the principal worldwide organization for name studies - a fitting reflection of her ability to move between linguistic traditions and scholarly communities.
Florence, Leipzig, and a European scholarly network
Although professionally associated above all with Pisa, Arcamone has long been closely connected with Florence and with scholars in German-speaking Europe. Her intellectual formation linked her to Giacomo Devoto and Carlo Alberto Mastrelli, and her publication history shows sustained engagement with German Namenforschung.
Her contribution to the Leipzig volume Die Stadt und ihre Namen, arising from the commemorative colloquium for the Gesellschaft für Namenkunde, is a particularly elegant example. In Die Stadt Florenz und ihre Namen she reads Florence through its hydronyms, street names, settlement names and older linguistic layers, showing how the historical landscape survives in urban nomenclature. The article appeared in Onomastica Lipsiensia 8, pp. 285–295.
This kind of work also shows why it is difficult to classify Arcamone simply as a “Germanist.” Germanic philology provided one of her principal methodological foundations, but names led her into Romanistics, medieval history, urban history, literary studies, epigraphy, geography and cultural history.
A teacher who created structures that outlived individual projects
One of the clearest signs of scholarly influence is not citation alone but the creation of structures in which other scholars can work.
Arcamone taught generations of students at Pisa; helped establish Onomastic Linguistics as a university subject; participated in PatRom; founded or co-founded O&L and Nominatio; contributed to il Nome nel testo; organized an ICOS world congress; served as ICOS President; and continued to participate in onomastic scholarship long after retirement.
In 2013 colleagues from numerous countries honored her with the 578-page Festschrift Nomina. Studi di onomastica in onore di Maria Giovanna Arcamone, edited by Donatella Bremer, Davide De Camilli and Bruno Porcelli. Its contributor list reads almost like a map of European and international onomastics, including scholars such as Richard Coates, Albrecht Greule, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Rosa and Volker Kohlheim, Dieter Kremer, Alda Rossebastiano, Grant Smith and Mats Wahlberg.
Yet perhaps the most telling detail is that her activity did not end with such tributes. In 2023 she took part in an extensive published interview reflecting on more than half a century of research, and in March 2025 she was still publicly lecturing on the birth and development of Onomastica & Letteratura at the University of Florence.
At ninety, therefore, Maria Giovanna Arcamone represents more than a distinguished individual career. Her work embodies a particular understanding of onomastics: names are linguistic forms, but they are also historical documents; they preserve migration, contact, memory, identity and literary intention. To study them properly requires philology, linguistic precision, historical knowledge and openness to neighbouring disciplines.
That intellectual breadth has been accompanied by something equally valuable: an ability to build scholarly communities. The institutions, journals, book series, congresses and international projects with which her name is connected have allowed other researchers - and several generations of students - to develop questions that extend far beyond her own bibliography.
On her 90th birthday, the international community of name scholars has every reason to celebrate not only an eminent Germanic philologist and onomastician, but one of the scholars who helped give modern European onomastics its interdisciplinary and international form.
Happy 90th birthday, Professor Maria Giovanna Arcamone - and many thanks for a lifetime devoted to names, their histories, and the people who study them.
Selected publications by Maria Giovanna Arcamone
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna, ed. 1971. Glossario delle parole di origine germanica. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1972. “Per lo studio dell’antroponimia germanica in Italia.” Studi Germanici 10(1): 247–260.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1976. L’antroponimia germanica a Pisa durante l’età longobarda. Rome: Bulzoni.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1977. “Per lo spoglio elettronico dell’onomastica italiana altomedievale.” In Informatique et histoire médiévale. Actes du colloque de Rome, 20–22 mai 1975, 193–197. Publications de l’École française de Rome 31. Rome: École française de Rome.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1980. “Antroponimia longobarda in Lombardia.” In Atti del 6° Congresso internazionale di studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Milano, 21–25 ottobre 1978, 277–282. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1981. “Antroponimia germanica nella toponomastica italiana.” In La toponomastica come fonte di conoscenza storica e linguistica, 29–45. Pisa: Giardini.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1981. “Le iscrizioni runiche di Monte Sant’Angelo sul Gargano.” Vetera Christianorum 18: 157–172.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1985. “Il mondo animale nell’onomastica dell’Alto Medioevo.” In L’uomo di fronte al mondo animale nell’alto medioevo, 127–173. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1985. “Die Flurnamen germanischen Ursprungs in der Toskana des Hochmittelalters.” In R. Schützeichel, ed., Gießener Flurnamen-Kolloquium, 395–407. Heidelberg: Winter.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1985–1986. “Cognomi da antroponimi di origine germanica in Campania.” Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli. Sezione Germanica – Filologia Germanica 28–29: 17–38.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1989. “Nomi medievali di santi e demoni.” In Santi e demoni nell’alto medioevo occidentale, vol. 2, 759–781. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1994. “L’elemento germanico antico, medievale e moderno (con esclusione dell’inglese).” In Luca Serianni and Pietro Trifone, eds., Storia della lingua italiana, vol. 3, Le altre lingue, 751–790. Turin: Einaudi.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1997. “Die langobardischen Personennamen in Italien: nomen et gens aus der Sicht der linguistischen Analyse.” In Dieter Geuenich, Wolfgang Haubrichs and Jörg Jarnut, eds., Nomen et gens: Zur historischen Aussagekraft frühmittelalterlicher Personennamen, 157–175. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 1998. “L’onomastica personale in Europa fra secolo IV e secolo VIII.” In Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichità e alto medioevo, vol. 1, 585–617. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna, Giorgio Baroni, and Donatella Bremer, eds. 2002. L’incanto del nome. Pisa: Edizioni ETS.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 2006. “Die langobardische Toponomastik zwischen Germania und Romania.” In Eva Brylla and Mats Wahlberg, eds., Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, Uppsala 19–24 August 2002, vol. 2, 21–33. Uppsala: Språk- och folkminnesinstitutet.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 2012. “Die Stadt Florenz und ihre Namen.” In Dietlind Kremer and Dieter Kremer, eds., Die Stadt und ihre Namen, vol. 1, 285–295. Onomastica Lipsiensia 8. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 2016. “Langobard and Anglo-Saxon Place Names: A Comparison.” In Carole Hough and Daria Izdebska, eds., Names and Their Environment. Proceedings of the 25th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, Glasgow, 25–29 August 2014, vol. 1, 59–67. Glasgow: University of Glasgow.
Arcamone, Maria Giovanna. 2019. “‘Gattopardo’ nome proprio: motivi della scelta.” Italianistica 48(2–3): 259–264.
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